Politicians and regulators rely on feedback from the public when setting policies. For-profit corporations and non-pro t entities are active in this process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers (and the public at large), however, may be unaware of the...

The use of judgmental anchors or reference points in valuing corporations affects several basic aspects of merger and acquisition activity including offer prices, deal success, market reaction, and merger waves. Offer prices are biased towards the 52-week high, a highly salient but largely...

We analyze how entrepreneurial opportunity cost conditions performance. We depart from the literature on entrepreneurship which identifies survival with performance. Instead, many entrepreneurs aim for a cash-out (IPO or acquisition), especially in innovation based industries. Striving for a...

We examine how executives' behavior outside the workplace, as measured by their ownership of luxury goods (low "frugality") and prior legal infractions, is related to financial reporting risk. We predict and find that CEOs and CFOs with a legal record are more likely to perpetrate fraud. In...

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported...

Does corporate culture matter? Can differences in corporate culture explain why similar firms diverge with one succeeding and the other failing? To answer these questions, we use a novel survey and interview-based analysis of 1,348 North American firms. Over half of senior executives believe...

Social progress through improved treatment of minority groups (the embrace of anti-racist and anti-sexist norms, for example) may or may not spread to corporate cultures through competition. Sometimes the market fails to adapt on its own and government must pass legislation to secure changes in...

What external control mechanisms are most effective in detecting corporate fraud? To address this question we study in depth all reported cases of corporate fraud in companies with more than 750 million dollars in assets between 1996 and 2004. We find that fraud detection does not rely on one...

Between one-third and one-half of employees participate directly in company performance through profit sharing, gainsharing, employee ownership, or stock options. This flies in the face of concerns about the free rider problem and worker risk aversion in group incentives, and raises many...

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....